re: #155 Dangerman

that’s why i was musing about a sort of distributed architecture that doesnt require everyone to keep moving themselves and coordinate their entourage to the same place too.

i can change email services anytime and mostly no one else has to do anything - or even know

I can go from outlook to thunderbird to proton and it doesnt really affect anyone else either. certainly not the basics of short messages and to who (or not) and filtering out the spam etc

need some folks smarter than me.

That’s mastodon — en.wikipedia.org

There are many individual servers in the “fediverse”. Server maintainers can block entire servers (which you really want to do, as there are lot of sketchy servers you really want to block).

In the Instant Messaging space, there was (and still is) Jabber/XMPP — XMPP being the protocol, and Jabber being a popular client. Of course, there were also a number of servers talking the same protocol (so compatibility with clients), but only as entry points into their own non-distributed server (for either corporate IM, or communication only inside their walled garden).

Interestingly enough, counter.social is built off of a fork of the Mastodon server software, but I do not know if they communicate with other servers.